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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25418908">infinite stars (he knows them all by name)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessoftheworlds/pseuds/princessoftheworlds'>princessoftheworlds</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Many Lives and Lies of Jack Harkness [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Torchwood</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Future Fic, Jack-Centric, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:54:01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,559</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25418908</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessoftheworlds/pseuds/princessoftheworlds</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>They say that everyone always dies twice, once when their life ends and again when they’re forgotten. There comes a point where their name is said for a final time and then never said again. Luckily for the Torchwood Three team of the twenty-first century, they were loved by an immortal man.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones, Owen Harper/Toshiko Sato</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Many Lives and Lies of Jack Harkness [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1779442</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>66</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>infinite stars (he knows them all by name)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/aellesiym/gifts">aellesiym</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This piece was inspired by my friend Shelley's lovely, lovely <a></a><a href="https://aellesiym.tumblr.com/post/624194269989732352/we-have-calcium-in-our-bones-iron-in-our-veins">art</a>. It's fucking gorgeous, I've been crying over it for six hours, and I highly encourage you to view it yourself! Shelley, I hope you like this!</p><p>Thanks to Jewels for the edit!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em> We have calcium in our bones,  </em>
</p><p>
  <em> iron in our veins,  </em>
</p><p>
  <em> carbon in our souls,  </em>
</p><p>
  <em> and nitrogen in our brains.  </em>
</p><p>
  <em> 93 percent stardust,  </em>
</p><p>
  <em> with souls made of flames,  </em>
</p><p>
  <em> we are all just stars  </em>
</p><p>
  <em> that have people names. </em>
</p><p>
  <b>- Nikita Gill</b>
</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Jack had always had a feeling that Owen Harper had come into this world just as he left it, raging and screaming against cruelties of the world.</p><p> </p><p>Life had been against Owen from the very beginning: his father left him, his mother despised him simply for resembling his father, and Owen grew up very alone, learning that the only way to get through life was to be noticed, was to be loud. So he acted out. He was the mouthy bloke in the back of the classroom, the mate who made bawdy jokes and outdrank you at the pub, the doctor who argued with his superiors that patients could still be saved. He tempered out when he met Katie Russell; they were a balanced-out pair, her quiet witty steel to his brasher, blaring fire. But then he lost her, and Owen fell into his grief, returned to being <em> loud </em>.</p><p> </p><p>But there had been a brilliance in Owen Harper that few had seen, very few, including Jack. Owen had been a lost little boy screaming out to the world in search of guidance, and Jack had stepped in to protect him. There had been a wild look in Owen’s eyes when he was on the edge of adrenaline, sleeves rolled back to work on his patients, to mend their wounds; a mania to his smile as he chased down Weevils, gun raised; a fierce kindness when he gave up his practicality to save as many as he could.</p><p> </p><p>In a way, Owen Harper had been one of the kindest souls Jack had ever met. Jack had seen him as a son, belligerent, acting out, but all in efforts to be noticed, to be <em> loved </em>.</p><p> </p><p>Even in death, having lost the ability to eat, drink, and fuck - having lost everything that made him feel <em> alive </em> , Owen had only <em> softened </em>. He’d returned almost to the man he used to be with Katie, having reached an equilibrium with Tosh, having been balanced out again. It was one of Jack’s greatest regrets that he hadn’t moved fast enough to take the bullet the first time at the Pharm or been there in Owen’s place at the nuclear plant.</p><p> </p><p>In the forty-seventh century, Jack is chosen to lead an expedition to an alien planet on the farskirts of the universe. </p><p> </p><p>It’s a luscious world, covered in velvety plants in dazzling shades and quiet babbling brooks of violet water; it’s a jungle paradise, and Jack and his men receive the frights of their lives when at night, the plants come alive and try to swallow some of his soldiers alive.</p><p> </p><p>In the morning, a brilliant fiery wave of light washes over the pale sky, the many suns of the planet rising, and the heat is almost too much to withstand, even for Jack’s Boeshane skin.</p><p> </p><p>The planet is lovely and vicious, kind and burning all at the same time. Jack names it Harper. A century later, Jack is on one of the first ships to colonize Harper. He raises the newest generations of colonists on tales of a kind, prickly doctor named Owen Harper who gave everything to save a world that had never loved him in return.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Toshiko Sato had been a symphony of misimpressions.</p><p> </p><p>When Jack had stood, looming, in the doorframe of her dark cell, she had looked skittish, easily frightened, a mouse to Jack’s wolf. But he had known her story, had poked around the incomplete blueprints and tested the sonic modulator himself. And he’d seen the flare of pride in her eyes when he’d complimented her brilliance.</p><p> </p><p>Tosh had been raised by a loving family, by parents who nurtured her, challenged her, adored her, with a younger brother who idolized her. But she’d also been raised with notions of deference instilled in her by her parents that warred with her ambition, with the dual identity of being both Japanese and British but not really <em> fitting </em>in either. She’d been too Japanese for the students at her posh boarding school, too British for her cousins back in Osaka. </p><p> </p><p>Like Owen, Tosh had grown up misunderstood and alone. Unlike Owen, she’d used her volume as a shield rather than a sword, using quiet to shroud the brilliant storm that was Toshiko Sato.</p><p> </p><p>Jack had known her, loved her, from the very first moment he told her about the Rift, about aliens, about Torchwood, and had seen not one ounce of fear in her eyes. No, instead, there’d been a hunger, a ferocity he’d only seen in the eyes of very few, a ferocity that was fixed in the eyes of a man with changing faces.</p><p> </p><p>The Doctor would have loved Tosh, Jack knows this to be true. She would have been the perfect companion, with the curiosity of Rose, Martha’s cunning, and - as only known to her enemies - Donna’s iron will.</p><p> </p><p>When the Doctor tells Jack, thousands of years after Tosh’s death, about meeting a brilliant scientist named Dr. Sato, Jack wears the biggest smile on his face, the proudest smile. If Owen’d been his son, he’d loved Tosh like a sister, like a daughter, and if there’d been anything he knew besides his trust in his team, it’d been how happy Tosh and Owen would have made each other. In some of his dreams, he attends their wedding, officiates, in fact, with Gwen as Tosh’s bridesmaid and Ianto as Owen’s best man. They’re all there, laughing and chatting and smiling long into the night, happy, healthy, and - most importantly - <em> alive </em>. </p><p> </p><p>Jack spends several years living on a mountainous planet where, once, for a solid month, a storm rages on, drowning villages and destroying forests, fundamentally changing the landscape of this planet. The month is devastating, but few die after Jack convinces many villages to climb the mountains, hide their families in the caves while the storm dies down.</p><p> </p><p>When it finally does, when the water recedes, Jack is one of the first to climb down. The land is utterly flooded, all the crops ruined. Jack helps the natives rebuild their villages, replenish their crops, learn to survive again. That’s what he does; Jack is a survivor.</p><p> </p><p>Many months later, when the first crop sprouts in purple flowers, Jack picks a flower and tucks it behind the ear of a dark-eyed girl never satisfied with his answers to her many questions about the universe. </p><p> </p><p>The girl, the flower, the storm, they all remind him of Toshiko.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Sometimes Jack thinks he ruined Gwen Cooper’s life by introducing her to Torchwood.</p><p> </p><p>She’d had everything all set, her entire life mapped out: a flat, a long-term boyfriend about to propose in another year, a job where she could rise through the ranks, parents who loved her. She’d been normal, completely normal, understood unlike Tosh, fitting in neatly unlike Owen.</p><p> </p><p>Not that she’d been quiet; she’d pulled enough pigtails on the playground and had knocked enough elbows in pub brawls to know that she would have to fight to the top, that she would have to prove her worth as a woman among her mostly male coworkers in the police force. She’d worked hard but fair, made enough noise when she had to, made sure that she, like Owen, was known, that the world wasn’t going to silence her.</p><p> </p><p>But she’d been another Tosh, hungry, curious, unsatisfied with the answers in the world, always suspecting the existence of something beyond humanity, beyond normalcy; Jack knows that Gwen had been destined to stumble into Torchwood eventually. She’d been made for Torchwood, just like Torchwood had been made for her. </p><p> </p><p>But before Torchwood, Gwen Cooper had never known <em> loss </em>. She’d been a round-cheeked, wide-eyed, babbling baby, always happy, always smiling. Strangers had stopped Mary Cooper in the streets to smile at Gwen in her pram. Young Gwen would swing from Geraint’s hand in the shops, dirty up her knees chasing dogs in the park, steal candy from her nan’s sugar bowls when she wasn’t looking. Teenage Gwen had been rebellious but still as kind as she was daring; she would bunk family dinners to go clubbing, but was often caught sneaking friends back to their houses.</p><p> </p><p>Gwen Cooper had been one of a kind. He’d brought her to Torchwood after she found them, because there’d been a softness, a ferocity, a curiosity to her doe eyes that had reminded him of Rose, but Gwen had proved Jack wrong. She hadn’t been like Rose; she’d been entirely unique. Rose had been all bright-eyed and optimistic, a dazzling sun, powerful enough to peer into the heart of the TARDIS and withstand its energy. No, Gwen Cooper had been beautifully human, multifaceted and flawed. She’d held all of humanity’s light and hope and heart but also its darkness and terror and violence. She’d withstood in the face of Torchwood and tragedies, a cliff among buffering waves. Strong and soft, fierce and kind, that had been Gwen Cooper, and Jack had loved her, just like he’d loved Tosh, just like he’d loved Owen.</p><p> </p><p>In the sixty-eighth century, in a wooded world that looks like something out of a fairy tale, Jack finds an alien creature that resembles a deer from Earth. Wobbly-kneed, wide-eyed, entirely innocent in these wild woods. His first instinct isn’t to name the creature and its species after Gwen; no, actually, the idea doesn’t even come to him until he watches the creature growl and nearly succeed in pinning a small bird to the ground. </p><p> </p><p>Unrelenting, he thinks, that’s who his Gwen had been.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Despite it having been several hundred millennia since his death, Jack still sees Ianto Jones everywhere. He’d been a rare kind of soul like Gwen, but he’d also been a study of the unexpected. Jack hadn’t forgotten him after a thousand years, let alone ten thousand.</p><p> </p><p>The thing about Ianto Jones had been that he’d relied on assumptions; he’d relied on eyes passing over him, on being able to blend into the background, on being taken for granted, on being underestimated. It’d been how he’d snuck Lisa Hallett, a Cyberwoman, into the Hub right under Jack’s nose. </p><p> </p><p>Underneath Ianto’s neat suits had run an incredible streak of passion. Ianto Jones had been unexpectedly passionate. Under the right circumstances, he’d been quick to anger, quick to violence, quick to give rise to the current of darkness inside him. He’d come from such a bruised and broken background, a father who mistreated him, a mother and sister who never really understood him, but despite that, he’d fought hard to keep the darkness at bay. He’d been a good man, desperate to do the right thing, the man who’d loved monsters.</p><p> </p><p>Ianto Jones had been a good man, and Jack had loved him so deeply, so unconditionally, that when Ianto died, a part of his heart forgot how to beat. And despite his big heart and the many others that he’s loved, Jack doesn’t think it ever really remembered. </p><p> </p><p>Torchwood hadn’t been enough for Ianto, Jack knows that now. Ianto Jones had been the kind of man who could have changed the world if someone had given him a shot. Ianto had changed the world, had saved the world - several times in fact, because someone <em> had </em> given him that shot, because Yvonne Hartman had seen past his Welsh valley boy facade, and sometimes, Jack hates her a little for it. Some nights, he dreams of who Ianto could have been without Torchwood.</p><p> </p><p>No, that’s not true. Those nights Jack dreams of Ianto, he dreams of a life <em> with </em>Ianto, happy, married, sharing a home. He dreams of living out the years with Ianto that death so cruelly snatched for him. Ianto Jones had been the one man Jack who would have given anything to become mortal for.</p><p> </p><p>In the not-so-distant future, Jack journeys to deep space and waits for the birth of a new galaxy. He floats through the empty blackness in his ship, drifting aimlessly. He inhales sharply and counts his breaths.</p><p> </p><p>The sudden light begins as a distant point, growing larger and larger until unexpectedly, it flares into <em> being </em>. It’s bright and beautiful, the flare of many colors, too brilliant and flashing too quickly for any single shade to be identified. </p><p> </p><p>Jack watches this all silently, feels trails of wetness down his cheeks before he realizes he’s crying. There is no one to wipe his tears away; he is alone. As always, Jack Harkness is alone.</p><p> </p><p>But once, he hadn’t been. For a few short brilliant years, he’d had Ianto Jones by his side. And how Ianto only remains in his heart, immortalized by the memories of an immortal man.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>They say that everyone always dies twice, once when their life ends and again when they’re forgotten. There comes a point where their name is said for a final time and then never said again. Luckily for the Torchwood Three team of the twenty-first century, they were loved by an immortal man.</p><p> </p><p>Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, Gwen Cooper, Ianto Jones; Jack had loved them all. They’d been his first team, and he hadn’t been looking for them. They’d found him. Owen had fought tooth and nail to uncover the truth behind Katie’s death. Tosh had defied time and space by building technology at least a century before its time to save her mother. Gwen had chased him across Cardiff and had broken through Retcon to uncover the mysteries of the universe. And Ianto, unrelenting Ianto, had never taken no for an answer and would have set the world ablaze to save Lisa.</p><p> </p><p>“How do you do it?” a younger, mortal Jack had once naively asked the Doctor. “How do you go on with life watching everyone you love die?”</p><p> </p><p>The Doctor, broody in his leather coat, had shrugged. “Because there is no other choice.”</p><p> </p><p>The Doctor had been right; there is no other choice. Countless years Jack has lived and countless loved ones he’s watched die, but it never gets easier. </p><p> </p><p>Once, Jack’d told Gwen about a firebird, a tiny creature that blazed so brightly that its afterimage stayed seared behind his eyes longer than it stayed alive. His team had been that firebird. He’d found them and lost them so quickly that their legacy lived longer with him than they had. </p><p> </p><p>Jack sees and hears them everywhere. He hears Owen’s bark of a laugh in a crowd, fading in the wind. He sees Tosh in clever fingers that work swiftly over devices, prideful smiles and ducked heads. Stars and the universe swirl in the eyes of young children with unbridled curiosity, just like they had in Gwen’s. Ianto hovers over Jack’s shoulder like a ghost, making witty comments, his accent lilting up like the loveliest song.</p><p> </p><p>Jack is Torchwood. Torchwood is his. His team had been his, his responsibility, his pride, his success, his failure. And now, they are part of him, the bones that strengthen him, the blood that flows through his veins, the weight of his soul, every thought and memory that flickers through his brain. Owen, Tosh, Gwen and Ianto are infinite stars that twinkle in the universe, and he knows them all by name.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Find me on tumblr <a></a><a href="http://princess-of-the-worlds.tumblr.com/">here</a> or on Twitter  <a></a><a href="https://twitter.com/rajkumarinik">here</a> to let me know how much you liked this fic or request a prompt. Also, please comment or drop a line below even if it's to telling me how you've been doing. I thrive on kudos and social interacting, especially in this day and age.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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